Unfortunately, I live about 10 miles from these people. Am I ashamed? I try to pretend I don't even know where Claysburg, PA is. Luckily Claysburg is NOT part of The Cove.

This just in! Here's a picture of me and the national texting champion! I've been trying for months to get her picture with me. You can read more about the texting champion here. Thanks Morgan! (and tell Lindsay to hold the camera steadier next time!)

I still stand by the claim that I'll never be a city boy. I've never been a fan of the big cities and I never will. After spending an evening in New York City the other weekend I remembered why I never cared to venture into those places just for "something to do." As if the ridiculously bad service at the Film Center Cafe wasn't awful enough, the sheer prices of everything in the city would just make me never want to spend money period. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed spending time with my friends, it was a great time, but if I didn't have friends that lived there, I wouldn't have gone. Chasing down a train by rushing thru Time Square and sprinting thru the station to catch the 1140PM departure so we wouldn't be stuck at Penn Station until 140AM ain't my idea of a good time. Although it does give me good stories to tell.

Now, my friends say where I live now stinks. No, they literally say it stinks, as in smells bad. Sure there is poop all over the place (farm land people, not in my house) and a paper mill just miles away, but frankly the smell of poop is a fresh scent. When they get the liquid stuff out and start spraying the fields it's a little nauseating, but aside from that, you know you're not breathing in any toxic fumes. Now the big city smell; wow I don't even know what the ef that is! It's some bizarre combination of urine, exhaust and B.O. all wrapped into one scent. Yummy! Why pay $7 for a beer or $10 for a Margarita when I can get $1.50 drafts at Big Dogz (not to be confused with Big Guns) and free shots down at The Creekside? Also, when sodas come out in little 6 inch glass bottles, you know you have just forfeited your right to free refills and paid $3 for a Coke. And the people! My word the people! They are everywhere! What in the heck are mobs, gigantically large mobs mind you, of people doing wondering the streets at 1130PM? In Altoona you'd be hard pressed to even find a single soul meandering around at that time, let alone a single bar open at that time. The roads are practically bare!

So kudos to all you rich people out there that enjoy the city life. As for me, I'll continue to enjoy my much less stressful life here in The Cove. So you have giant skyscrapers, Lexuses and tons of things to do. I live in a two story house, drive a Chevy, and need to travel thirty minutes at 70MPH to get to the nearest mall. Sure it may not sound like much, but that's what volleyball and The Office are for. And boats too. Those are really fun!

You know what I find truly amazing about this world? It's the fact that we can populate this globe with over 6 billion people and not a single one of us look the same. That is unless of course one has an identical twin or some freakish cousin that looks identical and looses control when eating hot dogs. Now I know what you're thinking, "Come on Jimmy. I see people all the time that look like somebody else." Oh you are too smart for me Mr. Thinker. Okay fine, let's assume that every person within an 8000 miles radius has another person that they look identical too. This is completely unrealistic I think, but I'm doing this just to humor you. So we now all have an identical twin somewhere, we just just don't know where, causing this planet to now contain over 3 billion unique faces. Let me give you some examples as to what 3 billion looks like. If all three billion of these people were to make a line, stretch their arms out and touch one another (in a non Madonna way of course) they would rap around the planet 114 times. That is of course assuming that the average wing span is 5 feet, we are on a major circle of the Earth and we can stand on water and permeate matter (I'm not really sure what the average wingspan is, this is just a guess factoring in babies, children and the ridiculously giant Chinese mutants). A pile of one dollar bills, stacked 3 billion tall, would measure more than 189 miles into the atmosphere, or if stacked horizontal would nearly stretch from Pittsburgh, PA to my hometown of Lancaster, PA. And if you ever wanted to count to 3 billion at the rate of one number per second, well you better start young because it will take you 93 years to complete. This is would be quite impossible though because honestly you can't even say numbers like one hundred thirty million three hundred and fifteen thousand nine hundred and ninety seven in less than a second.

Okay, I'm straying from my point here. What I wanted to get across was how amazing people's uniqueness is. Knowing that there are over 3 billion different people out there and each and every person could be identified simply by looking at his or her face is just nuts. Honestly can you even fathom that? I mean how many different combinations of Nintendo Miis do you think you could create? 3 billion? Maybe because you could put eyes on some one's chin or a nose on the forehead. But for our DNA to be so incredibly similar and each and every one of us look so completely different, well I just find it pretty darn slick. I mean think about it. How many ants or grasshoppers could you look at in a line and identify each one by their face? I figure 100 maybe. Two hundred if you have really good eyes (or can hear voices).

Special thanks to a colleague at work who took time out of his/her extremely busy day (extreme sarcasm) to find me information on one billion statistics. The arm stretch thing, I just did my own calculations, because I'm weird like that.